Good and Evil in Malice | Book Review

【 MALICE 】

The queer retelling of Sleeping Beauty you’ve always wanted.

Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, Fairytale retelling
Author: Heather Walter
Published: April 2021
Publisher: Del Rey
Pages: 464 (paperback)

This was honestly wonderful. I loved every second of this book and thought it was ridiculously fun what Walter has done with the original fairytale. Setting aside for one moment that this has an excellent sapphic love story entangled in its pages, the actual exploration of Maleficent’s character (Alyce) was done so well.

This felt like a mash up of Sleeping Beauty and The Belles, but if the latter had been a whole lot darker. I think one of my favourite things about this was trying to guess when Alyce would surely turn in the evil character we’re all expecting her to. I think I was guessing it would be the next page from about page 1 – so I spent a lot of this book on edge 😅

But that’s what makes this excellent! Walters has complexified (not a word) the story to new heights and taken what was a simple story with a purely evil villain (that we nonetheless want to believe has a redemptive side) and turned it into this complicated fae-involved, politically messed up kingdom of wonders.

Cannot wait to see what chaos goes down in book two because this ended in SUCH a perfect way. This story really toys with the idea of the inevitability of a thing when you put so much effort into avoiding it in the first place.